Prior art FIG. 1 illustrates a process 100 for marking an article of manufacture, in accordance with the prior art. As shown, the article of manufacture is initially marked with indicia indicative of various information (e.g. company name, product name, testing results, etc.). See operation 102. Such information correctly describes the article of manufacture when such marking takes place.
Thereafter, any of the aforementioned information may become out-of-date, and thus be no longer accurate. For example, a company may wish to revise a product name associated with the article of manufacture. In such situation, the indicia may be removed in operation 104. To this end, such indicia may be updated in the manner shown in operation 106. Unfortunately, such extra step of removing the indicia can be costly, thus adding additional cost to each article of manufacture.
Further, in a case where the article of manufacture is fragile or sensitive to the aforementioned indicia removal process (e.g. in the case of integrated circuits, etc.), the article of manufacture may even be damaged by the removal operation 104. This in turn, results in an increase in the number of unusable articles which, in turn, again increases the cost of each article of manufacture.